Chapter 16: The Last Days of Peace
Hitler's lies catch up with him, as Swedish businessman turned amateur diplomat tries to stall the inevitable.
This past week, I wrote about the Nazi-Soviet Pact and then recorded an interview with Professor Deborah Cohen. Our conversation largely revolved her wonderful 2022 book Last Call at the Imperial Hotel, which tells the fascinating story of the American reporters who covered Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. I highly recommend it (after, of course, you finish The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.)
I also posted the full audio from last week’s interview with Professor Michael Socolow about the 1930s boom in radio news, William Shirer’s experience transitioning from print journalism to radio, and adventures evading Nazi censors.
With the completion of this chapter, we’re now halfway through Shirer’s epic history! Sixteen chapters down, fifteen to go. Additionally, this is also the last chapter before we move directly into World War II. About half the book is devoted to the Nazis’ rise to power and their expansionist foreign policy, and the other half is devoted to what came of it: World War II.
Something that comes across so clearly in Shirer’s narration is the interconnected nature of Nazi ideology, their domestic policy, and their foreign policy. There’s a steady sweep from the origins of the Nazi party (or even Hitler’s personal biography) all the way through into World War II.
I’d be curious to know what you think, but to me, Shirer’s book doesn’t feel like a series of distinct episodes that are vaguely connected. Instead, it really feels like a single story.
This chapter, then, is the hinge of the story. So far, Hitler’s expanionist foreign policy had resulted in little to no pushback, and what physical violence there was fell short of war.
Starting in 1938, Hitler chose to annex Austria in the Anschluss, forced the British and French into a partition of Czechoslovakia in the Munich Agreement.
In the months that followed the Munich Agreement, it became clear that Hitler would not stop with the Sudetenland. In late 1938, Kristallnacht made clear the extent to which the Nazis would go in their hatred of the Jews. Then, in early 1939, Czechoslovakia was definitively split up with the Germans overruning Bohemia and Moravia and Slovakia becoming a rump state beholden to Germany. And as the year wore on, Hitler’s attention turned towards Poland.
As a result of these events in the wake of the Munich Agreement, the British and French began to read Hitler more accurately. Hitler, for his part, misread them, especially the shift on the part of the British.
This chapter delves into the diplomatic back-and-forth that preceding the outbreak of hostilities.
Hitler felt like he was the right age to go to war, and he didn’t want to wait until he was older. Italy, however, was far from certain. Mussolini repeatedly tried to stall. As the crisis continued, American President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Pope (among others) tried ineffectually to intervene.
Nazi propaganda repeatedly told stories about Germans being attacked in Poland, as they sought to ramp up pressure on their eastern neighbor. Shirer notes that what seemed so obviously lies and propaganda to him and othe foreigners were convincing to most Germans he encountered.
The diplomatic exchanges between Germany and other countries were utterly futile, full of propaganda as they were. Consequently, the entrance of an amateur diplomat in the crucial week before World War II should come as no surprise.
Birger Dahlerus was a Swedish businessman, who was very well connected in both Britain and Germany. A friend of Hermann Göring, he somehow got pulled into diplomatic exchanges between the two countries, as he tried to avert world war.
After meeting with the British, Dahlerus brought a letter from London to Berlin. Göring considered it important enough that he woke Hitler up in the middle of the night to meet with Dahlerus. As was his wont, Hitler launched into a long diatribe about the history of the British. After a short discussion with Dahlerus about the British people and the broader military situation, Hitler launched into another harangue. As Dahlerus noted later in life, “He seemed more like a phantom from a storybook than a real person.”
Eventually Hitler questioned Dahlerus: why couldn’t he come to an agreement with Hitler? Dahlerus answered honestly that the British lacked confidence in him and his government.
“Idiots!” Hitler replied. “Have I ever told a lie in my life?”
You have to laugh a bit. Hitler’s lies were woven through all the major events of the preceding year. The press, coordinated as it was by Goering, was full of lies and propaganda. Did Hitler lack self awareness? A liar must realize that at a certain point, people detect a pattern and their trust declines.
Eventually, Hitler calmed down and provided the amateur diplomat with six points for a peace deal. In the proposed pact, Germany would pledge to defend the British Empire, and Germany would get Danzig and the corridor and all the former German colonies would be returned (which, to be frank, was a tall order).
Dahlerus flew to London on August 27 and met Chamberlin, Lord Halifx, Sir Horace Wilson, and Sir Alexander Cadogan. As expected, the British refused half the points, even if they expressed an openness to an agreement.
This was enough for Hitler to respond somewhat favorably. Hitler had a friendly conversation with Neville Henderson, the British ambassador in Berlin, the day afterwards.
However, despite the conversation’s tone, Henderson did not trust Hitler. Just to give you an idea of the ambassador’s awareness: he remarked to a friend that one could not believe a word that Hitler said.
At that point, Hitler demanded that a Polish emissary with full powers to negotiate show up in Berlin. It seems clear that Hitler had in mind the same trap he laid for both the Austrian Chancellor and Czechoslovak President. An in-person pressure campaign meant to force capitulation.
By this point, the Poles knew how Hitler worked. And they wouldn’t budge. Similarly, the British carried with them the experience at Munich and didn’t want to be tricked again.
After another exchange of formal notes, Henderson and Ribbentrop met again on August 30. The encounter was later described by the interpreter (who was the only witness) as “the stormiest I have ever experienced in my twenty-three years as interpreter”.
Dahlerus flew back and forth between London and Berlin several times, escaping notice by reporters. And at one point, he tried to pressure the Polish ambassador in Berlin, who, exhausted and annoyed, refused to engage with the Swede.
In the end, though, none of it really mattered. Shortly after noon on August 31, 1939, Hitler ordered the attack on Poland, even while the last diplomatic exchanges were playing out across the continent.
As Shirer puts it:
In fact, all these scrambling eleventh-hour moves of the weary and exhausted diplomats, and of the overwrought men who directed them on the afternoon and evening of that last day of August 1939, were but a flailing of the air, completely futile, and, in the case of the Germans, entirely and purposely deceptive.
Towards the end of the chapter, Shirer takes the British ambassador to task for his attempts at appeasement: “an ancient truth was dawning on [Henderson]: that there were times and circumstances when, as he at last said, force must be met with force.”
Masters of the dark arts of propaganda, the Nazis knew that some facts on the ground were required to make it work. And so on the afternoon of August 31, Alfred Naujocks, a S.S. ruffian, carried out a false flag Polish attack on a German radio station in Poland. That was enough for Hitler to publically justify what he had planned all along.
The next day, Germany invaded Poland.
Topical Posts
Podcast ep. 1: The Man, The Myth: Hitler in American Culture
The Problems with the German Character Explanation of the Nazis
Podcast ep. 2: Why are Dictators (and Techno-monarchs) Appealing?
Podcast ep. 3: Interview with a 20th Century War Correspondent: Jon Randal
If You’ve Fallen Behind on the Reading, This Post is For You
Who was William L. Shirer? — part 2 (The Nightmare Years 1934-1940)
Podcast ep. 4: The Exhilaration & Peril of Covering the Nazis (with Prof. Michael Socolow) (Video, Audio)
Podcast ep. 5: What American Reporters Saw That Others Didn't (with Prof. Deborah Cohen) (Video)
Agree that it’s one long story. I have the idea that he didn’t think he was writing the first draft of history, but rather something for the ages. And indeed.